I was recently recollecting how Bethesda portrayed the Reachmen in TES V: Skryim, specifically how little thought they put into how members of their "Forsworn" faction talked. Take this note for example:

Do not presume we have grown fat and complacent here in the north. Our Matriarch was wise to bring us here. Our camp is secure, and our numbers grow.
We will not skulk in the shadows with you, making petty plots with rabble and sycophants. When we strike, we will do it with cunning and power, and the occupiers will fall before us. That is the way of true Reachmen.

Does it not sound a bit too polished and sophisticated? Would tribal raiders wearing animal skins and skulls, living in hunter-gatherer camps and witches covens, use words like "presume" and "sycophant"? There's a large dissonance there, something we should avoid with our Reachmen. Ideally, they should sound like they've lived apart from the other peoples of Tamriel for some time, with their own manner of talking. To accomplish this, we could take inspiration from Yakum Hairshashishi, an Ashlander living in Pelagiad, who spoke with a somewhat noticeable dialect:

There's bad magic in the dust from Red Mountain. The Sharmat Dagoth Ur sends bad dreams in the dust. The people can't sleep, act crazy. When the blight storms come, soul sickness comes -- both together. When I lived in the ashlands, I got no sleep, had bad dreams, was all the time tired. Now that I'm here in Pelagiad, I sleep fine.

Any thoughts on how we should approach this? Obviously, we don't want to do something stereotypical like giving them rearranged "Yoda" speech.

Yeti wrote:Does it not sound a bit too polished and sophisticated? Would tribal raiders wearing animal skins and skulls, living in hunter-gatherer camps and witches covens, use words like "presume" and "sycophant"?

The cultural evolutionist idea that hunter-gatherer societies would be less sophisticated and advanced is pretty outdated, something anthropology did away with somewhere around the early 20th century. That some of them would have trouble learning a language that is not their native tongue is a whole other matter.

In case of the Reachmen it's probably important to keep in mind that they are not even nearly as isolationist as the Ashlanders, that many of them live in towns among other races and that heavy language difficulties seem unlikely to me. On the other hand I don't see them speaking in the best Oxford English either. They have experienced centuries of surpression and make up a large percentage of the lower class people in Reach towns, after all.

I think that it's in certain wordings and formulae, but less much with grammatical problems as seen at Ashlanders or Beast races. I can actually perfectly imagine a Reachmen witch being well-educated under the hood.

Yes, the last thing I want to do is make them speak like cavemen or barbarians -- I definitely don't ascribe to the 20th century's view of hunter-gatherers. Naturally, there will be plenty of well-spoken Reachmen, even in the far-off villages. That said, I do want to make their dialogue sound culturally distinct.

Seeing that we have to find something in English, I'm not sure how much help it offers, though. We could try to collect some slang terms used to denounce people. A pejorative term for Nords or people of bad character, for example.
Edit: "Hornwielder"?

worsas wrote:
Seeing that we have to find something in English, I'm not sure how much help it offers, though. We could try to collect some slang terms used to denounce people. A pejorative term for Nords or people of bad character, for example.
Edit: "Hornwielder"?

- Weakling
- Soft-hands
- Wall-builder

For Nords:
- Tallman-kin (giants are taboo in Reachmen culture, pushed out of the Reach a long time ago)
- Snowman
- Loud-beard
- Invader (too generic?)

If we ever get voice acting for some basic responses, we should make sure to include these words somehow: